Freak accident kills filmmaker. Jack and his partner, painter and journalist Yvonne Baginsky, have been my close friends and hosts during my frequent trips to Scotland going back more than twenty years. Jack was a mercurial and passionate filmmaker and as gifted and gentle soul as I have ever met. I am going to miss the quiet glint in his eye and the impish grin across the kitchen table where on any given night he and Yvonne hosted a motley assortment of their transatlantic friends, many of them artists and musicians. I wish Yvonne and their daughters the strength to go on and, one day, thrive without this larger-than-life companion.

Jack’s recently completed film, Who Owns Jack Kerouac?, details the ugly contest over Kerouac’s literary estate; Jack had been unable to find a distributor for this film. And I am sorry I’ll never get to see what he would have made of the Khumb Mela footage he was editing at the time of his death.